Although there are many SEO tools available, Google Search Console is definitely the one you should register for first. Why? The search data and insights offered will be more accurate than those from any other third-party sources since, first and foremost, it is a Google product. Second, there is no excuse not to utilize it as it is free.
What, though, can you actually accomplish with Google Search Console? Let's find.
1. Submit Your Sitemap for Better Indexing
The moment your first page is published, Google's web crawlers will begin indexing your site; but, you may speed up the process by manually uploading a sitemap. In this manner, you can just instruct crawlers on what to seek instead of having to wait for them to do their task.
Describe a sitemap. Consider it a road plan for your website that can assist search engines in swiftly indexing all of your webpages even in the absence of strong internal links. Who then requires a sitemap? According to Google, sitemaps are minimal for "extremely large websites," "websites with large archives," "new websites with few external links," and "websites which contain rich media material." Every site owner should submit a sitemap, as we suggest.
To develop sitemaps for your website, you may use a lot of programs, both free and paid. You may create one using the Google XML Sitemaps plugin if your website is powered by WordPress. Once your sitemap is available online, navigate to Sitemaps in Google Search Console's main menu, fill out the URL, and click Submit.
That's all, then! The remainder will be handled by Google Search Console. Depending on how your sitemaps are produced, you might need to add separate sitemaps for posts, pages, and categories.
2. Find Your Top Keywords and Pages
People find your webpages by using a lot of specialized search phrases. In addition to providing impression, click, and CTR data for those keywords, Google Search Console may assist website owners in understanding what those search phrases are and organizing them according to the ones generating the most traffic. On the main menu, select the "Performance" option to see this data.
To access a specific range of data in the report, specify the search type (web, picture, or video) and date filters on this page. Additionally, you can utilize the comparison feature of the filters to see whether impression and click data has improved or declined over a specific time frame.
There is a tab titled "Queries" that is located below the fold. You may find a list of the keywords that are bringing the most visitors to your website here. When exporting the data in CSV format for additional analysis, you may sort the keywords by impressions or clicks.
The Pages, Countries, and Devices sections in the performance report display the pages on your site that receive the most search traffic, the countries from which the majority of inquiries come, and the devices people use to visit your site.
3. Improve Internal and External Linking
Everyone is aware of how crucial internal and external links are to your website's search engine optimization. In reality, a lot of SEO partners devote the majority of their time to link-building initiatives because external links are a significant ranking element. Internal links increase the discoverability of your content and lower bounce rates, both of which improve the general health and search engine performance of the website.
Links in the main Google Search Console navigation provide information on both internal and external links, as well as the top linking web pages and anchor text.
This information may be used to enhance your website's most ignored pages. How? You can now use this list of pages with the fewest external links to carry out link building efforts by starting by sorting pages in ascending order for the number of external links.
Similar to how you may sort pages by internal links to find the pages with the fewest internal links, you can then try to improve those webpages by adding more internal links.
You may find websites that are already linking to you by using the Top Linking Sites report. You may use this information to either locate and establish link-building alliances with websites that have audiences comparable to your own or to exploit those sites to generate additional external links.
4. Fix Crawling Errors and Broken Links
Broken links are unpleasant for your website's user experience and, more importantly, they can harm your search engine results. Therefore, it is crucial to repair broken links. In addition, Google's crawlers may occasionally be unable to reach certain pages on your website, which causes "crawl errors," another problem you should watch out for.
On the main navigation of Google Search Console, find the Coverage tab to get more details about crawling issues and broken links.
A list of sites classified under various error codes, such as URLs with Soft 404 and URLs with crawl difficulties, may be found in the Details section below the fold. In the report, Google Search Consoles gives you the option to look at specific sites and ask that the problematic pages be reindexed once you have fixed them. Here's how to solve it if URLs are being blacklisted by robots.txt and you're getting crawling issues.
5. Improve Google Analytics and Google Ads data
What about the top keywords, pages, and internal/external links? You could be thinking yourself at this point. "Won't I just find a lot of this data in Google Analytics?" You will, in fact, but nothing beats Google Search Console's precision when it comes to analytics and data linked to search. The Google Search Console should be linked to both your Google Analytics and Google Ads accounts for this reason.
When you link your Google Analytics and Search Console accounts, you can find all of the search data gathered by the latter, including impressions, clicks, CTR, and average search position, directly from Analytics. You can also utilize GA to set up automated reporting for Search Console data after your accounts are linked. Similar to this, linking to the Search Console will provide Google Ads users access to the Paid & Organic Report, which will help them better understand how both paid and organic search keywords contribute to user acquisition.
